And so the scientific observer is greatly distressed at times by the thought that there must be a mighty readjustment before things can come out smooth again. You might think that the whole thing had come upon science unawares, that it was, in the phrase of a young woman who was not new, all “too rash, too unadvised, too sudden.” But no sound authority exhibits real worriment on this point. If it is man who complains, it is man who refuses to get along without her. From this time forth business is going to be a co-educational affair. We shall be told many times again that somehow all this will detract from woman’s charm, and whether we believe or mistrust so much, we shall, I suspect, go on taking the interesting risk.
The Editor’s Busy Day
By the natural processes of time, women, young and old, will, I suppose, like the rest of creation, continue to become better off. Doubtless this is optimism. Pessimism says that two and two make three. Sentimentalism says that two and two make five. It is optimism that is content, and with good reason, to say that two and two make four.
The traveller in a scurrying railroad train becomes familiar with few more thought-suggesting sights than the farm woman in the cottage door. She comes forward with her hands in her apron, if not with a baby on her arm. Sometimes she waves her hand to the unanswering train. Sometimes she leans against the door-post and looks, one might fancy wistfully, at the clattering cars, at the people who are going somewhere. Sometimes the doorway is in a cabin with one room. Sometimes the woman is slatternly, drooping; sometimes she has the glow of content. The spectator in the car cannot but wonder what are the emotions of the spectator in the doorway. Doubtless there is both envy and commiseration on each side. If the spectator in the cars sometimes pities the woman in the cabin door as one who is left out and left behind, the spectator in the cabin door sometimes pities the haste-hunted spectator who is being noisily flung about in the great loom of life.
To glance backward over a century is to feel that life constantly reiterates this situation. We all of us are roughly divided—very roughly, sometimes—into the two groups: the people in the cars and the people in the doorways. The look of things must go on being affected by the point of view. There is a view-point aloof from either situation, but it is not one which the merely human sojourner ever can be privileged to occupy.
